


Two In a Twist

by Cluegirl



Series: Scatterlings and Orphans [9]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Bromance, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-27 19:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The friendships forged in combat are sometimes the only ones strong enough to save you from yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnonEhouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEhouse/gifts).



~* June, 1966 *~

"Stop me if you've heard this one," April said into her pint glass, "Howard Stark's butler walks into a bar..."

The shadow beside her didn't smile -- she'd have heard something crack if it had done -- instead, Edwin Jarvis leaned one well-pressed arm along the bar and loomed closer. "Mrs. Sloane."

April cut a glance at him and smirks. "Jarvis. Come for the wedding?" she leaned back to wave a hand at the crowded bar full of people in their very best clothes. Jarvis in his everyday suit was better dressed than any of them, while she, in work shirt and levis, with her hair escaping confinement to curl in her eyes, looked fit to be chased to the curb at any moment. "Looks like quite the party," April mused, watching a flock of miniskirted bridesmaids in buttercup yellow giggle off to the toilet together. "Are you with the Bride's, or the Groom's folk?"

Jarvis was having none of it though. "No, I've not come for the wedding, Mrs. Sloane, any more than have you."

"Well I know you've not come for the ale..." She gave a snort and sipped her beer -- a gutless, fashionably American brew, half froth and far too cold, but cheap enough to do the job eventually. Money she shouldn't be spending, but it was better than watching _Truth or Consequences_ , which was playing in the television lounge.

"I've come to ask you not to resign," Jarvis said, his eyes grave, worried, and uncomfortably blue.

"Hmph," she said. "Well congratulations; you've managed it. Well done, you." Then she turned back to the bar and waited for him to leave.

And so, of course, he did no such thing. "Perhaps I've misspoken," he said, pulling out the barstool next to her and climbing astride it. "What I meant to say was that I have come to _convince_ you not to resign."

"Can't." April shook her head as the Beatles took over the jukebox to announce that they could work it out. "Can't be done," she said, to him and to them and to the whole damned world, and most of all, to herself.

"Even so." The reply was just as implacable as she'd expected, but a pleading note tinted the next words like ink in clear water. "You mustn't leave, April -- not at all, but most certainly not now, with summer just around the corner. You know you're desperately needed-"

She drowned a curse in her pint glass, then drained it in three long pulls and smacked it down on the bar. The barkeep might have looked young, but his Pavlovian response to the empty 'toc' was instant. "Two more of the same," April growled at him, "And whiskey to follow. Neat. The Jameson." Again, it was swill, but she'd chosen the hotel for price, not quality, and her days of drinking only the best were most likely behind her now. 

"There's nothing desperately about it, Edwin Jarvis," she said once the boy had set their drinks up and left. "I am a bloody cook. A cook and a skivvy-herder. You can hire five more just alike, only younger and of sweeter temperament at half what I'm paid to do the work. If you let Stark do his own interviewing, there's a good chance they'll even wear heels and short skirts as well. And it's no good you looking constipated and disapproving at me," she added with a glare, "you know he would do!"

But the pained, patient frown didn't waver, even as Jarvis picked up the glass of beer and sipped, saying, "I'm merely waiting for you to finish demeaning yourself."

April grit her teeth at that. "Aye, well I have. That's why I've quit, isn't it?"

There at last was the flash of anger she'd expected in Jarvis' blue eyes. "You know very well how important you are to the Stark household, Mrs. Sloane," he clipped, "entirely leaving aside your work managing the household staff and kitchens. April, you know what you mean to _her_ -"

She cut him off with a laugh, bitter, thin, and like the beer, too cold. "Oh aye. I do know that, don't I?"

Jarvis watched her, silent, inscrutable, and ferociously patient. After a long moment and too much Paul McCartney, April sighed and scrubbed at her face with both hands. "Maria's pregnant again, Jarvis," she said through her fingers.

Anyone else might have read nothing into Jarvis' blink, but to April, it was as good as a flailing gasp. She huffed a laugh that was hollow and dry, and nodded her head. "Oh, it's sure enough. Three weeks past her monthly, and in that time she's not kept a bite down beyond weak tea and dry toast. She knows it, too. Makes a mess of her plate at dinner and eats not a bite, so no one will ask and she won't have to say so yet. Doesn't want to jinx it." Her lip curled hard to let the words get out.

At last, the old butler's face thawed enough to allow a slow lift of his eyebrows, and a tiny smile. "Ah," was all he said.

She scowled. "What?"

Jarvis turned his glass in place on the bar. "Surprising that jealousy should rear its head this far along, but..."

"Jealousy!" April turned on him, forcibly restraining her outrage, or at least her volume as the wedding crowd's din went briefly quiet and curious. "You sanctimonious bastard, it's murdering rage, is what it is!" she hissed. "It's Howard sodding Stark, who can remember the anniversary, birthday, favorite drink and whore of choice of every General on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and half of Congress, but can't be arsed to remember to put on a rubber!" She took a hasty gulp to loosen the knot in her throat. 

"Six months ago that miscarriage nearly killed her, Jarvis! Maria was a mess afterward, miserable and heartsick, barely got out of bed for weeks, not that Howard noticed. But when the doctor told them it was too risky for her to try for another baby, he was bloody well _there_!"

"And she will not, I daresay, consider a termination?" Jarvis murmured, in the voice of a man who already knew the answer to his question. The jukebox wailed that it knew she wanted to leave, but refused to let her go.

She laughed lest she snarl, and let the damned thing get to its begging. "Maria's taken a notion that if she can only give Howard a son to carry on his empire, he'll love her. She'd sooner die trying than risk him divorcing her for one of his party girls."

There, at last, the old hound roused himself to his master's defense. "Mr. Stark has better sense than that, I should think," Jarvis huffed. "He is, at very least, conscious of the power of scandal."

"When he's sober, perhaps," April allowed, "but how often is that these days?"

Jarvis tipped a meaning glance toward the glasses, pint and shot, at April's elbow. She glared straight back at him until he picked up his own pint and sipped. "Mrs. Sloane," he said, then drew up and began again. "April, Stark Manor has been your home for five years now. You've no family of your own in the States, and you can hardly return to Belfast. Where will you go if you do leave? Most nations do have extradition treaties with the UK these days, after all."

"Pfft." She dismissed his concern with a hand wave. "I was a child then, and a minor player in all that business besides. The warrant didn't stop me getting out of Ireland, what makes you think it'll trouble me now the crown's got bigger game to hunt?" Besides, she was closer with Charles' family than she'd ever been with her own, and they were no farther than Boston.

"The fact that your soon-to-be ex-employer has friends in Parliament, and is not well known for his forgiving nature," he replied, all eyebrow before she could say so. "Mr. Stark tends to be, you may remember, demonstrably vindictive when slighted."

Sodding vicious, more like, and petty and cruel besides. Still, she rolled up one shoulder in a shrug. "To my knowing, Howard Stark doesn't trouble himself over what I do, so long as his dinner's on time and his messes tidied up after he's finished making them."

Jarvis was too polite to roll his eyes, but she could tell it was a very near thing. "Mr. Stark cares very much what you do, April Sloane, or have you been operating under the delusion that the man has been somehow unaware of the affair you've been carrying on with his wife lo these four years past?"

She didn't glance around the bar to see who'd heard. She didn't hiss at him to keep his voice down. She didn't even flinch, just picked up her beer, sipped, and swallowed. "Being aware of a thing doesn't mean he gives a damn about it."

"Headstrong, obstinate girl! You make Maria _happy_!" he spat, anger breaking all at once through the implacable facade he cultivated so carefully. But even furious, Jarvis was restrained, not quite hiding hurt and worry beneath the anger's veneer. "You care for her, sustain her, and look after her in ways he knows he cannot, and Mr. Stark values that, however poor he might be at demonstrating his appreciation."

"However little he cares to bother showing it, more like," April answered back as, on the jukebox, Sinatra's girl began to brag about her boots. 

"He trusts you to shore up his marriage to a woman nearly half his age," Jarvis said, emotions back in control, mask back in place, though just enough askew to let concern and disappointment show about the eyes. "Take that away at a time when you know the results will be catastrophic for the family, and you must expect to encounter the very worst of Mr. Stark's infamous temperament."

"And there's the difference between us, Jarvis," April said through her teeth. "I don't give a fart in a windstorm for the worst of Howard Stark's temper. I'm not afraid of him." And she wasn't, that was the thing. For all his rages, tempers, and extravagant gifts, for all his manic hours, madcap antics and mountebank's flashover charm, April Sloane had never found Howard Stark more intimidating than any other spoiled toddler who liked his own way enough to pitch a wobbly every time he thought he might not get it. She'd no trouble telling the man so to his face, and Jarvis knew it, too. Interposed himself between April and her employer on a regular basis, lest she serve Howard up the sharp edge of her tongue, and often took the raking himself in the interest of letting her dump steam before she blew.

The pinched set of his lips was just the same now, for all his message was different. "Then if you're spoiling so for it, go and have your swing at him in person, for heaven's sake," Jarvis said. "Smash in his nose if you've something to prove, but don't cut the nose off your own life -- your own _love_ just to spite him!"

April, said nothing to the dare, just drank down half her beer with a grimace. Jarvis was smiling when she put her glass down, but it was a sad little thing, pointed with regret. "Ahh," he sighed as Nancy and her boots walked off together. "That's the real reason then."

"I've told you the reason, you ponce."

"You've talked around it, more like," he answered, unruffled. "You mightn't be afraid of Howard, but Maria terrifies you."

 

April watched the mirror behind the bar, her fingers folded neat and tight and not fidgeting at all. A drunken groomsman in a yellow cumberbund was trying to stare down the bride's mother's décolletage, much to the woman's delight. 

"You care for her," Jarvis went on, mercilessly kind. "That's clear to anyone who sees you together. You _love_ her, and she you, but you've just realized that you could lose her despite it all. And that's put you into full, scrambling retreat."

"Bollocks," she managed.

Jarvis took hold of her chair and pulled April around on it so that she must face him, meet his challenging stare, or else by the tilt of her chin, admit that she feared to. "Then why, pray tell, are you running away when you've nothing whatsoever to run _to_?" he asked. 

The jukebox unfairly began to croon in harmony of railway stations, and longing for home, and April knocked his hand from her chair with a snarl. "I'm not running away, damn you, I just haven't the stomach to watch it. I can't watch her die, Jarvis!" She had to stop as the word broke apart in her throat, had to swallow against the bleeding-sharp shards of it. "Not again, not so damned _senselessly._ Not for nothing."

He scanned her face for a long moment, long enough that the welling of tears could subside, and the damned song could begin to itch between her shoulders. "And if this child lives?" he asked her just as she was preparing to go put a shoe through the damned jukebox once and for all. "If Maria is able to give Howard a son, is it still for nothing?"

A fair question, though not so pointed as he hoped. April curled her lip at it. "If the birth kills her and leaves the poor little bastard with Howard alone, it's little better than nothing in my book."

One black eyebrow winged upward at that, and Jarvis flicked her a knowing smile as he reached for his beer. "Alone, you say? And your leaving now will prevent this how, exactly?" The amusement in his voice was thin, sharp, and hollow – it was the disappointment behind it that cut her to the bone.

"Damn you, what would you have me do?" April cried. "Stand by and watch it all over again? Hover and coo and change the bloody bed sheets while she's wasting away, turning green and sick and hollow day by day? Make chicken soup while the _one bloody thing_ I've wanted for myself -- the one soul in all the world worth a damn to me, rots away before my eyes?"

She shook her head and choked down her beer in one long go, swallowing as hard as she could against the words crowding up into her throat. Her voice, when she found it again, was a thin and shaking thing, equal kin to a growl and a whine, and still the best she could do. "It's not a matter of courage, man. It's not a matter of backbone or of heart; it's a matter of stomach." She hit her own for emphasis, the flat of her fist a solid thump against her ribs. "It's a matter of being strong enough, and I'm not, Edwin, I am simply not." Her voice creaked with strain, but the words, now they were flowing, would not be dammed up again. "I can't pretend it doesn't break my heart to leave... to leave Maria, but it would break all of me to stand by, helpless, and just ...watch her die." She shattered on the word, startled and helpless as the tears wrenched free of her grip at last. Furious and humiliated, she stuffed her fist between her teeth to muffle the wretched sounds and wrapped the other arm tight around her belly lest she shake to pieces.

She noticed, on some level, that Jarvis had plucked her out of the chair, tucked her underneath his long arm and led her like a child out of the taproom, but she could not manage overly to care about it. She allowed him to press her down into a quiet, shadowy corner booth in the empty dining room, bawled into her hands while he patted her shoulder and murmured 'there there' at her, and finally accepted his starched and ironed handkerchief when her sobs wound down to sniffles at last. 

He slipped away, giving her a bit of privacy to deal with the oceans of snot a hard weep would always bring, and when he returned, brought a tray with white china mugs, steel pots of hot water, and cheap teabags so old their paper wrappers were slightly yellow. Still, he busied himself soberly with the familiar, comforting ritual of making up the tea, his long fingered hands sure and calming over the sugar and milk. 

April watched him, her heart sinking lower and lower as she realized that she missed it, the homey familiarity of a proper tea between friends. The way it filled up the silences and gave one's hands something to do while one searched for words, the way it made talking so much easier. She'd left that behind her, coming to the States – had left so very much of herself behind in that long leap across the Atlantic. And now here she stood, toes over yet another cliff, and poised to jump for it. Ready to leave everything she knew behind, and to fly or fall, as luck would have it, and just how many times could she expect to amputate her life before there was nothing left of it to grow back again? And moreover, just how much of the bridge she was hesitating on was already in flames? 

She accepted the cup Jarvis passed her, and let the first sip press down her self-pity. "Anyway, you know my temper. It'd be a disaster if I stayed," she told him, aiming for pragmatism. "I'd most likely blow like a mortar under the stress of it and bash Howard's skull in with a kettle one day, and then where'd we be?"

Jarvis snickered over his own cup. "I daresay half the British Home Office knows your temper, April Sloane. It is legendarily explosive, after all." And there, dear heavens, he actually _winked_ at her. 

She couldn't restrain a laugh. "No idea what you could possibly be talking about," she said primly as she reached for the shot glass of whiskey he'd brought in with the tray and tipped a little into her tea. Then she sipped again, sighed, and gave up the truth. "And I don't know what else I can do but go. I feel as if I'll run mad if I try and make myself stay."

He plucked the whiskey from her hand as she made to set it aside, and dosed his own cup with a precise, flourishing pour that spilled not a drop. "I'll tell you what you'll do," he said.

April rose to it with a challenging stare. "Oh, and will you now?"

"Yes," he answered, unimpressed, "if you'll but set aside that righteous Irish temper of yours and _listen_ for a minute."

It was such a familiar tone, his superior English exasperation that she couldn't help but smile at it. She hid the expression in her mug though, and waved carelessly for him to carry on. He set aside his cup then, folded his hands on the table, and stared her squarely in the eyes with not so much as a distant rumor of mercy. 

"What you'll do is wonder," he said. "If you leave the Stark household today, like this, you'll do very little else for a long time. You'll wonder if Maria is eating, or even trying to. You'll wonder how thin she's gotten. You'll wonder if she's heartbroken over your going, or is putting on a brave face, or merely hiding in her rooms alone for days on end. You'll wonder if she's sleeping, or just pretending to sleep while she cries to herself in her room at night. You'll wonder if anyone is keeping her company while Mr. Stark is away on his yearly arctic venture, for which, I might add, he is scheduled to depart in less than a fortnight."

April sat up at that, her belly clenching. "He'd not go, surely, Jarvis! Not once he knows-"

But he rolled over her objection. "You'll wonder, April. Every day, you'll wonder if she's all right. If she's sick, in hospital; if the diabetes is back again, or if it's preeclampsia this time; if she's bedridden, bleeding, broken, or bored. You'll read the society pages every day with your heart in your throat for nine months, looking for some scrap of news, in case she's lost this baby as well." 

She wanted to close her eyes, to shutter out the welling heat of emotion those awful truths were forcing up into her throat, but clung instead, to Jarvis' gun-level stare, watching stubbornly as he broke her heart into ever smaller pieces. "You'll wonder every day if it's happened or not," he went on, neutral, frank, and awful. "And if by some great luck at the end of that time the newspapers tell you that Maria Stark has given her husband Howard the heir they've both hoped for, that both mother and child are well and whole... well. Then, you will spend the rest of your sorry life wondering if you dare try to come back to them again, and what might have been if you had found the strength not to leave in the first place."

And to that truth, April dared say nothing. They both knew he was right, however much she might wish she had it in her to call him a liar. For his part, Jarvis left her to her careful examination of her knotted fingers on the table before her, and calmly, unhurriedly finished his tea while faintly from the taproom, Petula Clark sang a sweet goodnight to her love.

When he set the empty cup and its saucer aside, they both knew he had won. "Take the rest of the week off, Mrs. Sloane," Jarvis told her, unfolding himself from the booth and brushing down his suit coat with efficient hands. "You need it, and I can manage well enough in your absence for that long. Rest. Drink," his mask cracked into a quick, wry smile. "Start brawls if that's what you need to settle yourself. Then come home and tell me your decision on Sunday."

And he might not have said it in as many words, but April could clearly hear what went unsaid beneath the order. ' _Don't leave me to carry this mess alone, my ally. If you are not there with me, I don't know how I shall manage..._ '

"Edwin." April sighed, flexed loose her fingers, and picked up her mug again. The brew within it was still warm, and still held no easy answers. "Is it worth it, do you think? What we do for them, the sacrifices we make so they can have things just the way they like? Does it even make a difference in the end?"

She looked up to find him smiling then, a wry, sad expression, more genuine than any practiced, proper face he would ever show to the world Upstairs. "I've no idea, April," he replied as he turned to go. "Should you reach said end before me, do please let me know what you discover, won't you?"


	2. 2

~* July, 1972 *~

"Faugh," April grunted, stopping short at the sharply sour reek of vomit in the kitchen she'd left spotless this morning when the Starks had left for the barbecue. "What's happened to you?"

Edwin Jarvis, ramrod straight and stripped to his undershirt and trousers, did not turn from the sink to growl his answer. "Howard."

"I heard him come in," she nodded. "He was turning his guts out in the toilet from the sound of it." She didn't mention having locked the door so the drunken fool wouldn't take it into his head to visit his wife and make her migraine the worse for it. "Apparently not the first time today, then?"

To that, Jarvis didn't answer, just wrenched the tap closed as if he'd have liked to pull the whole thing from the wall and throw it. The stink was sharper closer to, but between the baby Maria had given birth to, and the one she'd married, April had smelled worse in her time at Stark Manor. She let neither the lingering smell, nor the butler's glower give her pause. "But since Maria came home in a cab three hours ago, I'd thought he would get his ownself home and not trouble you on your holiday." She glanced into the sink, where Jarvis best Bond Street jacket and waistcoat puddled darkly, then turned to her baking cupboard for soda to lift the smell out of the wool.

"He mightn't have _troubled me_ ," Jarvis clipped, red to the chest with suppressed temper. "Only the Senator's wife rang when she took away his keys, and with the police commissioner there at the party, he didn't want to hotwire the car himself. Thank Heavens I was here to take the call."

"I'd have answered," April replied, and let the smug curl of her voice say that she would have driven out to the Senator's barbecue, collected Tony, and then left Howard behind to walk home or sleep himself out in a ditch, whichever he managed the better. 

Jarvis' sniff betrayed that he'd heard the unspoken clearly. "You were seeing to Maria," he answered stiffly, then his voice softened a trifle to ask, "I'd not have wanted to distract you. It seemed like a bad episode when she came in earlier."

April nodded, not trusting her tongue. All of Maria's migraines were bad these days, and coming closer together as well. All any of them could do for her was to give her quiet and darkness, coax her to new doctors when she'd go, and hope that things would get better somehow. "How is she now?" Jarvis asked.

"Sleeping," she sighed. "Or she was, before Howard came bashing about and rattling things. I'd just come down to fetch some crackers and weak lemonade, in case she might manage to eat a bit, and oh, just be quiet," she bit out when Jarvis made as if to shoo her along. "You know as well as I that she'll most likely ignore them anyway. Whereas you're standing there with sick all down your best trousers as if it'll wipe out on its own, which it won't. Let's have them in with the rest then."

"Mrs. Sloane-" Jarvis huffed.

"Mr. Jarvis," she mimicked his tone without mercy and clapped the box of baking soda on the counter. "You know I don't care a fig for your shorts or what you've got in 'em. I'm trying to save your best suit here." He glared, and she gave it straight back to him with a grin for spice. "I might not enjoy wrestling you down and stripping your smelly trousers off you right here in the kitchen, old man, but you should know I'm not morally opposed to it or anything..."

Jarvis rolled his eyes heavenward, but unbuttoned and let the black cloth slither to the floor without another word. 

April collected them as he stepped clear and pitched them into the sink. "And just why," she asked, using a wooden spoon to poke the fabric under the water, "couldn't Miss Tandry have driven Howard and Tony home from the barbecue?"

Taking the damp sponge she offered, Jarvis wiped at the remaining stain along his shirt tails with a grimace. "Because Miss Tandry tendered her resignation this morning after breakfast," he replied in a voice so even and inflectionless it might as well have been a snarl.

April whistled lightly through her teeth. Another governess gone, and this one after only four months. "Was it Tony this time, or Howard?" she asked, worrying the sodden clothes with her spoon and watching the water cloud.

She felt, rather than saw Jarvis' weary shrug. "Does it matter? She was not equal to the task required of her, and..." The sponge slapped down into the shallow water with a curiously final sound. "And realizing that, realizing that her best efforts could make no headway against the obstacles ranged against her, and that she would be neither recognized, nor thanked for her struggles against those obstacles, she rather shrewdly chose to leave."

Her back stiffened at that, at the tone of exhausted, disgusted resignation that stained her best friend's voice like sick in the water, and April turned to stare. Jarvis did not meet her eye, just wrung his wet shirt against the kitchen towel as though he wished it had breath he could choke away. "Edwin," she murmured, feeling a chill of angry dread across her shoulders.

He did not meet her eye, merely wrung and wrung and choked every drop of water from his ruined shirt. "I left my home for this life, April, did you know? I'd so little left after the blitz, but I still had family, and friends I loved then, and I'd have found a situation in London, helped to rebuild it after, only... Howard Stark, genius hero of the SSR wanted to take me on, and I was... flattered." He said the word the way he might have said 'an idiot'; thick and brittle with disgust. "I left England, left everything I knew, thinking that surely the aide and ally of such a brilliant man, such a driven man must carry with him a sense of purpose, of destiny perhaps... or at least of self respect." He laughed then, an arid, aching sound, and shook out the strangled towel with a snap. "Lately I have come to feel not much like any sort of man at all – more like a tick, dangling from a rabid dog." 

And then he turned and took himself off out of the kitchen; as stubbornly erect in pants, socks and knee-garters as ever he'd been in wool and linen. Habit, April realized, was keeping his spine locked straight where pride could not do the job, and that, she would not have. Not at all. She slung the spoon onto the counter, took hold of her temper in both hands, and marched after him.

"It won't work you know," she said, hard on Jarvis' heels as he climbed the stairs to the servants rooms. "Howard's not going to let you leave – he never has before." Still angry, or perhaps foolishly ashamed of his outpouring, the man didn't answer, and so she pressed on. "He knows damned well this place would never hold up without you, Edwin. It'll be full on revolt within a week; barricades in the ballroom, gardeners handing out the pitchforks, and there's bound to be explosions as well."

That won a huff, and she chose to take it for grudging amusement, though he didn't slow, or even acknowledge her at all. "That's why Stark's always gone begging after you every time you've left before," she went on. "Because he's an arse of a genius who hasn't the wit to maintain a damned thing once he's built it, and he bloody well knows it. Nothing's changed there."

"Well perhaps it's time it did so," Jarvis growled at last, throwing open his door and marching into his room. He didn't try to close April out of it, which showed the man still retained some vestige of sense. "Perhaps without others picking up what he drops, the man might learn how to-"

"Bollocks," April cut him off without mercy. "That one, learn any damned thing that doesn't suit him? The man is rich, and always has been! He'll only hire someone else, who'll then only bungle the job trying to learn it, and the rest of us will be stuck straightening up the results." 

He fixed her with a glare, but didn't contradict. Then he turned back to his wardrobe, reaching for a charcoal grey dinner suit April knew damned good and well he'd only just bought, and dearly too. It was still in its plastic sheath, unworn, and entirely above the kind of day this was turning out to be. She marched over and slapped his hand away from it. "Oh, for heaven's sake, it's still your day off man!" April said and plucked a pair of brown tweed trousers out of the wardrobe. She thrust them at his chest, then turned and scooped up a red golfing jersey and tan cardigan and added them to the stack. 

"Now put those on and tell me, really, what this is all about. And none of your ancient history, either," she warned, putting up a finger. "You're not to pretend we don't know each other after all these years, or that I can't see right past your stiff upper lip."

His glare remained intact for a long second, but when April settled her hands to her hips and thrust up her chin, he relented with a sigh that as good as said he was only indulging her because she was being damned inconvenient. "There were to be fireworks at the barbecue," he murmured as he buttoned down his ruined shirt.

April glanced out the small window at the long, low light of a New York summer afternoon, and nodded grimly. "Ah yes. I do recall our young tyrant mentioning something about that." By which she meant to say that Tony Stark had been over the moon about fireworks from the moment he'd learnt about the barbecue, and for going on three weeks now, had been chattering about them, history, chemistry, and construction, to any of the staff he'd been able to coax into listening. April had even heard the boy begging Howard to buy him chemicals so he could build his own contribution to the barbecue's display. 

She sat on the narrow bed and gave a sigh. "And now, because of his Ma's head and his Da's liver, he'll have no fireworks at all but what he can see from the roof, poor mite."

"He didn't so much as cry," Jarvis said after a long silence, trousers held loosely before him as if the effort of stepping into them was too much. "When I came to drive them home, he was polite to the hostess, quiet and obedient in the car... stoic as a child could possibly be with his own father acting out a tantrum in the front seat, but..." He faltered, eyes bright with angry tears

"Aye, but he's a child still," April nodded, ignoring the twist of rage in her own belly and making her voice something like a soft comfort, "and there's only so much he can hide from you, who knows him better than anybody."

Jarvis drew in a deep, shaking breath, and visibly gathered himself. "The boy was crushed," he said, dressing with brisk efficiency now. "But he was also unsurprised at the disappointment. On some level, I think he expected it, however much he hoped for better." He buttoned up his cardigan and turned to face her with a cutting twist of smile. "I know I did, which was why I did not leave the Manor when given the day off."

April met his eye coolly, her belly simmering with rage that would keep for later, even as her heart wrung for this old, wounded friend she'd never expected to like, let alone love as a brother. "Edwin," she said, and held out her hands for his. 

He raised his eyebrows, as though to scold her presumption, but she ignored that and waited until his stiff British resolve crumbled. Then she drew him to sit beside her, and slung her arm over his shoulders. "Don't think I'm not conscious of the irony when I say you've got to get your temper in hand here, man," she said. He sniffed, and she grinned at the showy disapproval. "You've every right and reason to storm off and have done with the lot, but you can't, Edwin, you simply can't."

He slanted a glance her way, weary, braced, waiting. He knew what was coming, and so she didn't bother to pull the blow. "You can't leave Tony like that. Who'll he have to count on if he doesn't have you? Me?" she laughed. "I'm bitter, mean, sarcastic -- hardly fit company or care for a child. And Maria, for all I love her, doesn't have the first idea how a mother's meant to behave." April shook her head, brutally honest with herself as well as him. "Between her spoiling Tony rotten when she sees him and then forgetting he exists when she doesn't I'm afraid she's less than useless as a parent. And then there's Howard."

Under her arm, April felt the man sigh. "And then there's Howard," he agreed.

Presently, when the silence had begun to say what they both wished unsaid, she ventured a pat on the man's knee, and a friendly jostle to his shoulders. "Come on then, it's no good sulking like this without a glass in hand, and I daresay himself won't miss a few fingers from the decanter at his condition."

Jarvis chuckled there, clearly tempted, but he shook his head as he settled his long, thin fingers over hers with a pat. "No, I must really check on Tony first. He was right there when Howard..." a single, sweeping gesture and a grimace of revulsion supplied the hint. "He was more than a little splattered himself."

"Ouf. The pig," April snarled, not meaning Tony. It was a token of his lingering temper that, Jarvis didn't scowl at her for the disloyal sentiment. 

"I'd asked him to have a shower when we got home, but when last I saw him, he'd changed clothes, but was in his playroom glowering at that toy dog he'd got for Christmas." Jarvis sighed, and smoothed his hair with both palms. "He might require some convincing on the topic."

"And by 'convincing,'" Sloane grinned, "you mean to say 'bribery'. Don't think I don't know your wiles, Mr. Jarvis." Still, she got to her feet and brushed down her skirt as she followed him from the room. "Well, you're lucky; I've got that shortbread he likes on hand. I'll just go and bring some up whilst you open negotiations, shall I?"

***

The trip to the pantry took less than a minute, but by the time April arrived at young Tony's playroom – she refused to think of it as a laboratory, no matter what the six year old terror whom it served might play with inside it – it was abundantly clear that negotiations were not going well at all.

The reek of ozone and hanging curtain of blue smoke in the air might have had something to do with that. The mechanical guts of the electronic dog strewn across the room as though he'd been flinging the parts at the walls also bore out that supposition, though with Starks, it was often to differentiate total, spiteful destruction of a machine from 'just upgrading it'. Tony's mulish, sooty, surly face, though, lent itself toward the spiteful destruction end of the scale.

"It's mine anyhow," the boy was snarling, brown eyes bright with angry tears as he wrenched at a stuck nut in the metal housing of the leg. "And it's stupid, and it doesn't do anything cool."

"An oversight which, as I recall, you had been amending," Jarvis coaxed idly from his respectable distance, though Sloane could tell just how much he wanted to take the tool away. "Surely smashing your work at this stage is not going to make the device function any better, young sir."

"Doesn't matter," Tony answered, his voice wavering. "It wasn't ever gonna work anyhow. It was no good to start with. Just a dumb toy for dumb babies, and I-"

"And you're filthy and smell like the gutter outside a brewery, young man," Sloane cut through his self pity, setting the cookies squarely on top of a scattered constellation of metal bits and wires. "Were you not told to go and have a shower?"

The glare he shot her was a fiercely loathing thing, tinged equally with humiliation and gratitude. "I changed already," he said, taking a cookie. "It was just on my clothes."

April sniffed pointedly. "I find I disagree. Still, if the idea of showering properly was so far beyond you, you might as well have left your dirty clothes on – I could have tumbled you and them, and Mr. Jarvis' dirty suit into the washer and had done all in one go. It's not as if it'd be a tight fit, small as you are."

"Thank you, Mrs. Sloane," Jarvis cut in as Tony colored scarlet and began to puff up. "But I cannot allow the young sir to be washed via machine."

The boy's color darkened to maroon, but the tears had fled his eyes in favor of snapping anger, so April helped herself to a square of shortbread, and goaded just a little more. "Well it's not as if he'd be the most delicate thing I've ever laundered, you know. I'd see to it he didn't shrink. Still," she sighed, "it's plain enough he doesn't want to go, Jarvis. Shame, that is, after you'd worked so hard on the surprise."

She didn't miss Jarvis' startled flinch as she turned for the door, but whatever else one wanted to call Edwin Jarvis, slow would never suit. He schooled his face into its familiar, disapproving scowl at once as he pushed off the desk to follow. "The surprise which is no longer a surprise, thank you Mrs. Sloane."

"Well, what does it matter now?" she asked, letting him open the door for her so she could pull it closed behind them. She didn't raise her voice then, but made no move to put any further distance between them and the door. "He's as good as told us to go away and leave him alone, and it's not as if your friend David will be able to hold back the Battery Park display a whole day just because young Master Stark's got himself into a snit and would rather smash up his work than go watch them light the fireworks off."

"Mrs. Sloane, you are the worst keeper of secrets ever born," Jarvis groused, his eyes shining with grateful epiphany. "You were meant to merely pack the picnic dinner and keep mum about the rest. Now you've gone and ruined everything."

April grinned at him and took the liberty of winking, because if the old fool had actually forgotten his having dated that dashing young fireman last year, then he bloody well deserved her taking the piss of him for it now. "Well, what kind of a dinner do you call hot dogs and ice cream anyhow?" she complained in her own turn. "The boy'll grow wider than he will tall with that kind of nutrition-"

Tony flung the door open then, face hot, eyes wet and furious as he glared up at them. "You're making it up," he said, the hope in his eyes a terrible thing. "There is no surprise."

Boosting an eyebrow at him, Sloane bit her shortbread in half. "Are we now?"

"We were supposed to watch fireworks at the barbecue."

"Oh, perhaps," Jarvis allowed airily. "And if you like, we may certainly go back to the Senator's house and watch." April restrained a frown, sensing the line Jarvis was pushing between a lure they could actually play out, and an outright lie. "It's only that the Battery Park display is usually the biggest in the city, and you'd seemed more interested in the rockets themselves than the lights and explosions."

April scoffed. "The boy's a Stark. Of course he likes the explosions. But you're neither of you dressed for the Senator's barbecue now, are you? So you'd better go along to Battery Park and have done with it. Assuming you've done with your sulk, Tony."

Tony shrugged, a carelessly insouciant gesture that was about a decade too old for him. But his eyes were canny as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his short pants. "Can we have potato chips with our hot dogs?" he asked it like a dare.

She sighed and made a show of rolling her eyes in disgust. "Only if you put that damned contraption back together again before we go," she told him, pointing to the scattered bits of robot dog still in the play room. "I'll not have Elena trying to vacuum around the gears and springs when she comes in here to clean tomorrow morning."

Tony rolled his eyes right back at her. "I'll just make a better one later," he said, but retreated into the room and began gathering up the wreckage all the same. April shared a look with Jarvis and retreated to the kitchen to leave him to it. 

"I don't actually know as how I've got hot dogs in the larder just now," she admitted when they got there. "Shall I ring up the butcher for delivery, or do you want to just buy dinner off a cart?"

Jarvis checked her with a look, reproachful and soft as a hug. "April Sloane, I confess I couldn't care less about the damned hot dogs just now," he said. "You are bitter, mean, sarcastic, and I owe you a great debt for being somewhat brilliant as well. I'd forgotten all about David's hobby. Of course he'll be involved with the city's display."

Grinning with triumph and not ashamed of it at all, April continued to search the refrigerator. "You're still on good terms with him though? Despite not-"

"Good enough terms for this," Jarvis smiled, a genuine, easy expression that did not often see light in the Stark Manor. "And David's always loved children; his reason for getting married last year, ironically."

April laughed. "Oh, don't raise your nose at it, Edwin. I married Charles for a green card, a beard, and the ability to stay where Maria needs me. Not nearly so noble as a love of children, when all's said and sifted. And no, there's no hot dogs to be had in here, and peanut butter won't go the distance, I fear. Street cart it will have to be." 

Jarvis smiled, knowing, as April did herself, that Tony would love the horrid cheap food, and positively adore the novelty of buying it on the sidewalk instead of bringing better fare from home. "On days like these, April, I feel nobility of purpose must fall a far second to anything that allows one to be where one is so clearly needed." He settled a hand on her arm for a moment, the fingers long, elegant, and damp with relief. "I might marry you myself one day," he confessed, blue eyes only halfway joking, "if you will keep on being so damned helpful."

April clapped his fingers under her own, gave them a squeeze, and then pried his hand lose. "You might ask, you stuffed up toff," she grizzled over the fond tightness in her throat. "We both know that young Tony's a jealous mistress though. He'll be years in learning how to share his things with anyone. Best you keep to handsome firemen in your off hours, and leave me in the kitchen where I can do less harm, hm?" 

His bark of laughter surprised them both. "Well, perhaps I shall," he said with a grin. "I'm off to make a call then. I expect we'll be ready to go in about an hour. And, Mrs. Sloane?"

"Yes, Mr. Jarvis?"

He nodded toward the sink, still full of crumpled, sodden wool. "Have Darla send that suit to the cleaners on Mr. Stark's account, will you please?"

"Of course, Mr. Jarvis," she grinned, fully intending to order another good suit from the man's favorite tailor as well, and tack the total right onto the cleaning account. And if Howard bloody Stark should ask about the accounting, well then April bloody Sloane might just have a thing or two to say to him about the cost of leaving messes like this for others to tidy up.

In the meantime, she set about making up a few sandwiches for show. Tuna, she reckoned. It was the boy's least favorite without being loathed, and having a meal to ignore and feed to the ducks would make Tony's contraband hot dogs all the sweeter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the interest of full disclosure, I have never seen the NYC fireworks show, so I don't actually know for sure if the Battery Park display is the biggest, but I am assuming that, like most municipalities, the fireworks displays are handled by either city firemen, or volunteers. Should any of you dear readers know differently, do please let me know -- if nothing else it's nice to learn new things.

**Author's Note:**

> [AnonEHouse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEhouse) asked for: _"And if you happen to get bit by plot bunnies going back in the past to show the definitive moments where Jarvis was considering quitting because of Howard, but decided to stay because of Tony, and where Sloane was considering quitting because of Howard, but decided to stay because of Maria, that would be AWESOME. Doubly awesome if Jarvis and Sloane interacted (not nookie, although it if went that way, that would be fun) and understood and respected each other and cooperated to run the household/protect the ones they felt deserved it, and provide buffers for Maria and Tony."_ ) 
> 
> And so here is the first of those. Given that Sloane and Jarvis are both queer in this universe, there will not be any J/S though. They have a decades-long serious bromance going on, but are decidedly not each other's types.
> 
> Also, sorry if it seems I'm Howard-bashing, by the way. The parameters of the request determine, though, that the readers are going to be seeing poor Howard at some pretty bad times, and in a pretty bad light. You can't judge a guy by just what you see when he's in his worst light, and there are actually levels to Howard in this 'verse that make up for some of his asshattery, I promise.
> 
> Jukebox playlist for chapter 1 is as follows:  
> We Can Work It Out, by The Beatles.  
> Ain't Too Proud To Beg, by the Temptations.  
> These Boots Are Made For Walking, by Nancy Sinatra.  
> Homeward Bound, by Simon and Garfunkel.  
> Goodnight My Love, by Petula Clark.


End file.
